Presenter is Josh Knowles, a freelance designer who has worked on both game designs and other application design (http://auscillate.com).

Abstract: Tricks and techniques from the game design world can be applied to non-games — social apps, creative tools, etc. — to improve user experience, user enjoyment, and results. We’ll look at traditional UX in a new light: from the perspective of games and gamers (and zombies, aliens, and goombas).

Notes:

• How to get people to sign up for something or participate in something?
  • Often, approaches to UX for these things tends to be a bit dry
  • The idea is to create passion in users to get them to want to participate
• Game design is starting to work its way into other things now
  • American Idol
  • Million’s Poet
  • Toyota Prius efficiency leaves in the dashboard
  • Target checkout terminals – grades/scores
• Game design can be a big part of interaction design, but right now it’s often a novelty and not something core to design
• Games take a task and apply rules to give the participants enjoyment and satisfaction
  • Classic arcade games are this boiled down to essentials – basic tasks with applied rules and risk/reward structures
  • Galaxy Zoo; Solar Stormwatch – astronomical phenomena turned into a game
  • Google Image Labeler – the timed tagging and matching tags from two random strangers
  • Faux stock markets
  • (my note) Formspring.me is kind of game-ish
  • Slashdot comment moderation and granting mod points to random users to help improve comment displays to random users (and Karma)
  • StackOverflow applies this to Q/A (10 points to rate up, 100 points to rate down, 200 points to see fewer ads on site, 1k points to delete questions)
  • thesixtyone – music filtering system
  • Foursquare, Gowalla, and MyTown (duh)
• Basic concepts
  • Points (especially public points and high scores)
    • Number of friends
    • Percentage completion of participation (Shelfari, LinkedIn)
  • Badges and Achievements (specific defined activities)
  • Unlockables (site or application features you receive as a reward for participation)
    • Individual unlockables versus global unlockables
  • Game boards
    • Visual representations of what’s available or what you can do
• You can learn from:
  • Classic video games
  • Board games
  • Sports
• Basic game concepts have universal appeal and people can recognize them quickly
• Education (games are excellent teachers)
• Invitation (give users an explicit invitation to participate – these are ways to nudge users towards certain actions)
• Pitfalls
  • Don’t use points in a way that will distract users from what’s most important on the site
  • Don’t put a number on a bad behavior
  • Don’t oversimplify what’s important to your service
  • Don’t let people game the system – avoid anything that can be automated to success (challenging to avoid)
  • Avoid blocking people in to the point where they can’t build on top of your service or innovate new ways to use it (Twitter)
• Reasons to do this stuff
  • Educates your users and makes them better users
  • Creates better differentiation for users
  • Users are more willing to collaborate